Irish Trojan in Tennessee

See the nice fishies

By Brendan Loy

We went to the Aquarium of the Smokies in Gaitlinburg this afternoon. It was suprisingly awesome, and Loyette was totally fascinated by the fishies, including this jellyfish.

Congo capital gripped by penis panic

By Brendan Loy

Posted without comment:

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. ...

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure. ...

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. ...

Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters..., "When you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'?"

(Hat tip: Becky.)

Comcast was stealing our cable!

By Brendan Loy

Well, the good news is, our high-speed Internet woes are -- apparently -- finally over. The fourth time was the charm, as Thursday's visit from Comcast techs fixed the problem. We have a newly installed coaxial line running from the cable source to our apartment, and as a result, our downstream speed is now faster than ever, our upstream speed is back to normal, and we've had no more intermittent connectivity outages.

The bad news is, we finally know what was causing our issue in the first place -- and the explanation is pretty outrageous.

As it turns out, our previous cable line, which is supposed to run from the "lockbox" (where we have our own individual cable outlet, labeled with our apartment number) directly into our apartment, was instead being run through two separate splitters in the attic above our building, with each splitter taking a portion of our cable signal -- that we pay for -- and feeding it into someone else's apartment!! Thus, the signal that actually reached our apartment was severely diluted, and the resulting decreased signal strength (roughly an 8 dB dropoff) was apparently the culprit in all of our Internet woes.

Mind you, this wasn't the result of our neighbors stealing our cable. They don't have access to the locked attic. According to the Comcast techs who explained it to me, this was the result of Comcast splitting off our cable line to feed a signal into these other apartments!! The cable company was stealing our cable!!

More details after the jump.